Tressel has a long and documented history of denial. He didn’t know that a star quarterback at Youngstown received more than $100,000 and a new car from Trustees, even though he told him to go see those same Trustees for guidance. He didn’t know about Maurice Clarett‘s litany of rules violations, gifts, and downward spiral, despite professing that he spent more time with the troubled athlete than any other player under his tenure. Sure, mistakes were made, but it was okay because he was More Than a Coach as a biography of the man proclaimed. He was revered as a dignitary, downright saintly even, by not just fans of THEOhio State University but sports fans in general. It was all an elaborate fiction, though, as the Sports Illustrated piece revealed. Tressel wasn’t clean, he was crafty, and he got away with it because sports fans and many in the sports media are amongst the most easily deceived and gullible people on the face of the planet.

The truly astounding revelation isn’t that a beloved father figure in sports was exposed as a fraud. It’s that the sports media is so scandalized by transgressions in an inherently corrupt system known as the NCAA. The problem is bigger than Tressel, new cars from Trustees, new houses for parents, shady scholarship grants, and people looking the other way. The problem lies in an amateur collegiate sports program that rakes in untold millions of dollars for corporations, Universities, broadcast networks, cable outlets, and the NCAA as a whole on the backs of kids who are given conflicting messages: you are not allowed to reap what benefits we reap from your sacrifices and talents, but take it if you can get it.

Fans of college sports can and will use whatever warped reasoning they have for their continued and undying support of programs that create ethical quandaries and use up young men like cattle, grinding them out and dumping them off without providing anything resembling real world experience or realistic expectations for what lie ahead. They’ll tell you that these kids all know what they’re getting into, that they’re old enough to know right from wrong, and after all, they’re over eigteen years of age and as such are culpable for their behavior. All of which is true, to a point; if any of them commit a crime, they’ll stand trial as adults. That reasoning, though, applies uneven standards and expectations on young, spoiled minds that are told they’re superstars. Not that they’re going to be superstars, but that they already are. They’re told by people in positions of power, authority, and prestige that they deserve these things that are given to them, because after all, they’re valuable commodities.

Some will say that Tressel should not be held accountable for the actions of others, and that the worst he did was look the other way so that these young men’s futures weren’t jeopardized. That, however, is a gross misreading of the circumstances and willfull ingnorance of his history. More than that, though, it continues the practice of self-deception in the mainstream when it comes to college sports, which are ideally supposed to be held in that order of esteem: college first, then sports. The reality, though, is that certain sports come first. I wouldn’t deign to call it sports college, though, because that infers there’s something of value at the end of it for many of the players. The sad truth is that a great disservice is done to the athletes participating in the major sports programs through a culture of exploitation and lack of ethics in the NCAA.

For far too long, the mainstream sports media has engaged in an attitude that the ends justify the means and that the revenue brought in every year by big-time football and basketball programs only makes those colleges better and gives opportunities to other programs and students where they otherwise may not exist, as if this is somehow impossible without comprimising things like ethical behavior and personal responsibility. Those same apologists, writing columns for major news organizations, will then go on ESPN and crow about the ruination of baseball vis a vis the steroid era, the bad behavior of NFL players, the egos and brazeness of NBA players openly colluding with other players in direct violation of policy en route to a championship, and all the other things that have contributed to a time where role models are few and the concept itself is all but discouraged.

The bottom line is that it all starts somewhere, and it’s with men like Jim Tressel and programs like Ohio State. Let’s not pretend, however, that this incident is isolated. We need to start asking some real questions about not only the accepted behaviors behind the scenes as a whole but also why we’re so willing to look the other way when it doesn’t do anyone any good, especially the players themselves.